After withdrawing recognition to nearly 1,000 teacher education institutions(TEIs) across the country, the National Council for Teacher Education(NCTE) has asked them to close operations. Another 3,000 institutions offering bachelor in education (BEd) and diploma in education (DEd) courses are under the scanner.

A senior official at the ministry of human resource development said notices will be served to the other institutions soon.

There are around 16,000 TEIs running under NCTE, an autonomous regulatory authority under the HRD ministry, which had asked the institutions to disclose data about their operations through affidavit last year. Despite extending the deadline to December 31, 2016, only 7,000-odd colleges submitted the data. The Council further extended the deadline by six months, but many institutions failed to submit the affidavit. Many failed to substantiate their claims during the inquiry process.

"The whole exercise is to integrate the databases we have and make it transparent so that when the institutions come for recognition and accreditation, we can easily validate the claims during inspection. However, despite repeated reminders and extensions, many institutions didn't disclose their details," said the official.

While many of these institutions didn't submit the affidavits even after the last date was extended to July 31, 2017, some of them which did submit could not stand the scrutiny in the subsequent inquiry. NCTE has identified nearly 4,000 such institutions, of which 1,000 were served notices in the first phase and the rest are going to be served notices by March, 2018.

NCTE finalised the framework for accreditation and opened the platform "TeachR" for uploading academic assets in July this year where the TEIs were asked to furnish all data including personal assets of the staff. The process started with Bihar because of a high court order asking the Council to inspect all TEIs in the state.

Until now, the agency designated by NCTE for accreditation was the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC). Between 2002 and 2017, NAAC could accredit only 1,522 TEIs in the country while an estimated 16,000 to 18,000 TEIs needed assessment.

Some private players have allegedly been running TEIs, claiming compliance with NCTE rules. "Many of these private institutions masquerading as 'not for profit' organisations are using TEIs to convert black money into white. They will be out of action soon," said a senior NCTE official.